5Ep.. A Hand's Breadth

“Mingyu, wake up!” He shook his shoulder, and still Mingyu wouldn’t wake. Doha stopped his hand. Waking him wasn’t the answer. He leaned close to the sleeping man’s ear and chose the words this man had spent his life fleeing.

“Your hand reached him, didn’t it.”

Mingyu’s eyelids trembled.

“It wasn’t too far to reach. You reached him—and let go, out of fear.”

Mingyu opened his eyes. His body stiffened at the sight of the foot of the bed. Not because Doha pointed—with his own eyes, for the first time, he saw it. His own water-swollen face, reaching a hand out toward him.

“…I know.” For the first time in three days, different words came out of Mingyu. Close to weeping. “I know. I reached out. But the moment he grabbed my wrist— afraid we’d both go under, I let go. I let go. Out of fear.”

“…I’m sorry.” Mingyu reached out toward the figure—this time without pulling back. “I’m so sorry. What I turned away from wasn’t you—it was myself, in that moment.”

The figure did not move for a long time. Then its stalled arm, very slowly, crossed the last hand’s breadth. Two hands touched—the living man’s, and the hand from the moment he’d turned away.

Doha watched those hands, breath held. The swollen face was slowly easing. Not resentment, not terror—just the face of one who had waited a long time. And like water drying, it quietly scattered. At the last, a single line remained. Whether it was the junior’s or Mingyu’s, even Doha could never tell. You can stop being cold now.

Sea stared blankly as the thermometer climbed slowly back to eighteen degrees. The water sound in the recorder had stopped somewhere along the way. Her hand went to the recorder and, for the first time, pressed the stop button. Not because there was nothing left to record—but because she had just seen, with her own eyes, something records could not hold.

“…This.” She said it softly. “It’s in no paper anywhere.”

Before leaving, Doha crouched at the entrance. Every other wet mark had dried and vanished, but one palm-sized patch stayed wet to the end. He looked at it a moment, then peeled it away without a word and wrapped it in a handkerchief.

The case was over. And still Doha’s face would not unclench. He kept feeling the pull of his own left arm.

Back at the consultancy, his hand stopped as he took off his coat. The mark on his left arm hadn’t faded. Far from fading, it had darkened, and a new one was spreading onto the back of his hand. As if the cold that had left Mingyu, with nowhere to go, had moved onto him.

“You said it disappears once it’s laid to rest.” Doha asked the teacher. “So why am I heavier? Did I… send it off, or did I take it on?”

The teacher didn’t answer. When Doha unwrapped the handkerchief and held out that last fragment, the old man’s eyes fixed on it. And slowly hardened.

Doha looked too. Inside the unfading patch of water, a single strand of hair was tangled. Very thinly, tied into a knot.

“…This is strange.” Doha lifted the knot to eye level. “Lingering doesn’t tie its own hair on purpose. Lingering comes loose and scatters—that’s what it does. This… someone bound this by hand.”

The teacher could not pull his eyes from that single strand for a long while. Then he spoke—not as a casual verdict, but as if forced to admit it.

“…This is not natural.” The teacher’s voice sank low. “This haunting didn’t form on its own. Someone grew it.”

Doha looked down again at the mark on his hand. Over it rose the smell from days ago. Rain-wet earth, antiseptic. Not the scent of the scene, but the one that came from his own body.

“Teacher.” He asked slowly. “Seven years ago… what happened to me?”

For the first time, the old man’s eyes avoided Doha’s.

“That—” the old man’s voice cracked. “Don’t ask. Not that.”